Workshop Statement

Shoptalk: Field Tools for Critical Making engages participants to practice methods of thinking and making to promote social resiliency, art for social change, and participatory action for peace. This halfday workshop will give participants the opportunity to collaborate and build their own submissions for the Field Tools for Peace ISEA exhibition and online gallery, and explore new approaches to making. Workshop leaders will start with short presentations about their own community arts practices and case study overviews. Workshop participants will then have the opportunity to introduce themselves and brainstorm topics and mediums to create projects with. Methods for collaboration through rapid prototyping and problem solving will include creative acts of listening, and shared narratives and visions of possible futures in both digital and public art installation.
Shoptalk: Field Tools for Critical Making looks beyond solo authorship to explore and practice processes for collaborative making; identifying and establishing new toolkits for peace and safety; tools for engaging digital communities in meaningful ways; creating practices of identity and disguisement in precarious situations; and creatively exploring and establishing practical and theoretical relationships with peace and nature. This workshop will be translated into both Spanish and English by one of the bilingual workshop facilitators.

• Jiayi Young is an Assistant Professor of Design at the University of California, Davis, USA. Her inquiries lie within the emergent and experimental field of digital media with an emphasis on the cross-disciplinary areas of design that integrates the arts, the sciences with cutting edge technology. Her current research and creative work are focused on constructing data-driven sensor-enabled interfaces, installations, real-time projection graphics, participatory performances, and immersive environments in cultural and public places with a goal of creating generative energy to engage the public in social dialogue. Using multidisciplinary approaches, her work examines contemporary society including the culture of consumption, the programming and exploitation of the feminine, cultural assimilation, and personal identity. Leveraging social media, crowd-sourced media, and user-created content, she sets up scenarios and creates conditions to make visible empathetic relationship between people in the presence of contemporary culture. Her work invites the public to participate in order to come in close contact with an experience that engages the rethinking of the human condition. Jiayi Young actively exhibits and lectures nationally and internationally. At the University of California, Davis, she also co-directs Leonardo LASER speaker series.    jiayiyoung.info
• Beth Ferguson is Assistant Professor of Design at UC Davis, USA   soldesignlab.com
• Sara Dean is Assistant Professor of Graduate Design at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, USA   design.cca.edu/#/
• Glenda Drew is Professor of Design at UC Davis, USA                                          arts.ucdavis.edu/faculty-profile/glenda-drew